This invention relates to a process of and an apparatus for producing a wire strand with a terminal.
Conventionally, a wire harness (wire assembly) used for wiring of an automobile or a like vehicle includes wire strands on which indications are provided to indicate applications and/or functions (such as, for example, applicable loads, systems and current capacities) of the wire strands. A wire harness such as, for example, a wire harness 5 shown in FIG. 4 is composed of several wire strands such as, for example, wire strands shown in FIGS. 3a, 3b and 3c. The wire strands 4, 4', 4" shown in FIGS. 3a, 3b and 3c, respectively, have different indications including, singly or in combination, a straight line 1, a spiral line 2 and a chain line 3 which may be of different colors from each other and/or from a basic color or colors of the wires 4, 4', 4".
Accordingly, in producing such wire strands 6.sub.1, 6.sub.2, . . . , 6.sub.5 as shown in FIG. 5 which make various elements of a wire harness, various types of wires which are different in color, diameter and so on are prepared in advance, and in a process of producing a wire harness, wire strands with terminals are produced from such prepared wires by means of an automatic wire processing apparatus which performs, in combination, metering, cutting and stripping of, connection of terminals to, and assembly to housings of the prepared wires of such various types, and then the wire strands with terminals thus produced are bundled for individual circuits to thus form a sub harness or a main harness.
The prior art described above has following problems:
(1) For example, 300 to 400 different types of wires of different colors must be produced and managed for a single automobile.
(2) Because wire strands of a same type are produced on an automatic processing apparatus in accordance with data stored in advance in a control unit regarding stripping of an insulator coating, presence or absence of a terminal, a type of such terminal and so on, whenever wires of a different type are to be produced subsequently, software for processing must be changed, which will result in increase in load to storage capacity in a control system.
(3) Where a wire strand with a terminal is automatically fitted and assembled to a housing at a last stage of an automatic processing apparatus, the wire processing operation is further complicated by the step.